They actually had to start assigning certain amounts of top finishers to certain airframes. Used to finishing in the top percentiles let you pick you plane, so all the best pilots picked the big planes like the P-8 Posiedon so they’d skip recertification when they went to the airlines. Too many did so and admin mandated 50% of the top has to go fighters.
The “Fat Amy” has taken a lot of sexy out of naval aviation now that all the F/A-18 Hornets (“Rhinos”) are getting converted over to “Grizzlies.” A lot of pilots opt out of the F-35 for quality-of-life reasons since the cockpit is like sitting in a papasan chair and it feels like flying a brick.
We love our poorly educated 
And pray that you don’t go through all that only to be given the keys to a brand new, sparkly F-35 that nobody knew was never built to fly.
They actually had to start assigning certain amounts of top finishers to certain airframes. Used to finishing in the top percentiles let you pick you plane, so all the best pilots picked the big planes like the P-8 Posiedon so they’d skip recertification when they went to the airlines. Too many did so and admin mandated 50% of the top has to go fighters.
The “Fat Amy” has taken a lot of sexy out of naval aviation now that all the F/A-18 Hornets (“Rhinos”) are getting converted over to “Grizzlies.” A lot of pilots opt out of the F-35 for quality-of-life reasons since the cockpit is like sitting in a papasan chair and it feels like flying a brick.